1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to systems and methods that are used by help-desk and other organizational support personnel to produce, track, and perform trend analysis related to customer service requests and inquiries.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the past, call centers and other customer service centers providing help-desk and related services spent significant time and resources to produce accurate trouble tickets related to customer inquiries, to track such tickets and related data, and to perform trend analysis related to the same. The solutions presented to date to effectively manage and process customer support inquiries ran the gamut from manual ticket recording and processing schemes to elaborate and widely distributed automated systems.
Unfortunately, typical customer support ticketing, tracking, trending systems present serious and significant barriers to effective management control. Even worse, traditional systems do not lend themselves to central storage of customer service ticket data, effective and efficient analysis of such data, and easy tracking of the same. Such problems are exacerbated by the fact that many systems often involve disparate technologies and platforms that do not effectively communicate with each other. And, another frustration often realized is the fact that many systems are not well suited to particular customer service needs. As such, organizations involved in providing customer support oftentimes must spend significant time and resources to develop otherwise custom solutions and systems to service the needs of their customers.
To make matters worse, prior systems do not allow efficient and effective querying of older, archived trouble ticket data. In particular, organizations involved in providing customer support continue to have no effective way to query prior period trouble ticket data to drive trend analysis and corresponding resource allocation. As such, many organizations either over spend resources in efforts to review prior period trouble ticket data, or do not avail themselves of statistical data that can be used to streamline support processes and, ultimately, to save on resource expenditures.
An exemplary system in which trouble ticket data is generated according to the prior art is shown in a drawing figure attached hereto which has been identified as FIG. 1. In FIG. 1, a system 100 includes several trouble ticket repositories 102, 104, 106, and 108 which may be operated and managed by one or more organizations involved in the provision of customer support such as help-desk assistance and the like. Each trouble ticket repository (e.g., repository 108) has database management systems and/or other systems to facilitate generation, storage, and retrieval of trouble ticket data related to one or more customers. For example, it is quite common for a trouble ticket repository like repository 108 to include spreadsheets containing raw trouble ticket data.
Help-personnel and systems (designated as xe2x80x9cHDxe2x80x9d) may access their respective trouble ticket repositories to access and retrieve local-type trouble ticket data. Unfortunately, however, because trouble ticket data stores often do not possess any consistent file structure, etc., significant time and resources have been spent querying the same to produce outputs such as statistical reports, etc. In fact, many organizations have had to employ special teams of personnel to manually sift through whole lengthy collections of raw data each time a customer or management organization seeks ticket response related information. As such, within the typical system depicted in FIG. 1, there is no way for an organization to globally analyze trouble ticket data over any particular period of time. Furthermore, as each repository system may service a different customer or user population, technology and platform differences often prevent distribution of data for global management review. And, as is often case, such localized repositories do not possess the resources to store trouble ticket data relative to a longer period of time to assist with trending and resource allocation. As a result, a system similar or like the one shown in FIG. 1 does not facilitate online storage and instant-access type retrieval of trouble ticket data to further facilitate organizational wide ticketing, trending, and tracking of customer service inquiries and needs.
Thus, there exists a need to provide new and improved systems and methods that will facilitate central storage of customer support ticket data and that will enable effective and efficient trend analysis and tracking. To be viable, such new and improved systems and methods must be easily configurable to suit a wide variety of customer needs and must be able to respond to management analysis requests without requiring significant system re-tooling. Such new and improved systems and methods must support (and include) modern data processing technologies including database management systems and networking environments.
The present invention solves the above-described problems associated with managing resources to facilitate ticketing, trending, and tracking of customer support inquiries. In particular, the present invention solves such problems by centrally storing trouble ticket data according to a common data storage scheme and by enabling remote access and query review of the same via efficiently deployable client and server technologies and systems. As such, the present invention now allows organizations involved in providing customer support to implement a client/server system provided by the present invention to facilitate centralized storage of trouble ticket data (including archival type data), trending processes related to the same, and tracking of customer service inquiries.
The present invention solves the aforementioned problems and delivers the above-stated benefits by providing systems and methods for managing the collection, trending, and tracking of trouble ticket data within a data processing environment. The systems and methods include and involve a central data storage facility for storing trouble ticket data including archival type data corresponding to customer support requests and inquiries according to a common data storage scheme and a plurality of data processing systems coupled to the central data storage facility via a network system, for example. Each data processing system of the plurality of data processing systems is configured to facilitate collection, trending, and tracking processes related to the trouble ticket data stored in the central data storage facility via a graphical user interface configured in accordance with the common data storage scheme.